Books That Matter: Sarah Wang on THE TOPEKA SCHOOL by Ben Lerner
Welcome to the FictionMatters Podcast. I’m your host Sara Hildreth and this is Books That Matter. In this series, I’ll speak with writers I admire to learn about their lives as readers and deep dive into a book that matters to them.
Sarah Wang is the author of New Skin (Little Brown, 2026), which was named a best book by NPR, Apple Books, and was featured in Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, People, and Bloomberg. She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books. Wang is a MacDowell Fellow, a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, a Sewanee Writer’s Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar, a Tin House Scholar, and the winner of a Barbara Deming Award. She teaches creative writing at Barnard College.
In today’s episode, Sarah joins me to talk about Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School. I loved this book, and processing my reading with Sarah made it all the richer. We delved into the mind-bending world of psychoanalytic theory and speculated on what the book is saying about language, masculinity, and trauma. Then we dive into Sarah’s debut novel New Skin. This book is the very definition of a rich text. I was thrilled to get to ask Sarah all of my questions, but also appreciated the questions she asked me about my experience reading her book. While we do get into some specifics about The Topeka School, we don’t include any spoilers for New Skin and you can listen to the episode without yet having read either book.
You can find New Skin in your favorite bookshop now! This is a highly original debut that I hope more readers will pick up!
Connect with Sarah: Website | Instagram | New Skin on Bookshop | New Skin on Libro.fm
